Images in bitonal formats often include watermarks, stamps, or other patterns and artifacts. These patterned artifacts may be represented as a series of geometric points, dots, and/or dashes in the general shape of the original pattern. These patterned artifacts make other processes such as optical character recognition (OCR) difficult or impossible when items or pixels of interest are also found within the pattern. Current patterned artifact removal solutions use methods of erosion to minimize the unwanted patterned artifact. However, such methods also erode the pixels/items of interest which, in turn, cause failures in other processes, such as OCR, that are desired to be carried out on or with the image.